The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 257

Ask a border patrolman how many aliens are missed for each one captured, and the answer usually is, "We get one out of two." But many will then throw up their hands and say, as San Diego sector assistant chief patrol agent Robert C. Gilson did in an Interview, "If we said what we really thought, they'd think we were lying." In the Infrared scopes, Gilson said, an observer can sometimes see groups of 30 go by, too quick or too distant to be captured by patrol officers engrossed in processing the groups they have already apprehended. One of the few serious studies of successful border-crossers, conducted by UCLA researchers for the Labor Department in 1979, discovered that 69.6 percent of a sample of 1970 illegal immigrants in Los Angeles had never been previously apprehended. It was an astonishing figure, given the large numbers of often-captured aliens who swell the annual apprehension totals. Cornell University economist Vernon Briggs Jr.

said the study "lends credence to the belief" that the illegal inflow "is certainly several multiples" of the INS apprehension figure. One congressional staff expert said some Texas sectors of the border had shown a recent jump in apprehensions even though they had not yet gotten their new consignment of Border Patrol personnel. Gene R. Smithburg, another assistant chief patrol agent here, said San Diego sector figures show apprehensions this year up 40 percent to 50 percent, while the number of patrol officers has increased only 30 percent. The difference, he thinks, represents a greatly increased flow as the Mexican economy falters and the California economy booms.

Professional statisticians and immigrant-rights advocates treat all Border Patrol figures with skepticism. Those numbers, who knows how to put any credence in them?" said Susan Drake, staff attorney with the Los Angeles-based National Center for Immigrants' Rights. She cited a family of 15 illegal aliens who returned to Mexico for Measuring the Migrant 'Flow' Laxalt, at the end of his Senate career (and possibly a presidential candidate in 1988), is now determined to get the bill through. The Paiutes are equally determined that it shall not pass. Reno interests and Newlands farmers vigorously back the bill; the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society join the Paiutes in opposing it, as do other tribes, fearing it will set a precedent for depriving them of their own water.

The first Senate hearing on this bill is scheduled for July 15. On the surface, the conflict looks like a zero-sum contest: One side wins; the other side loses. If the Paiutes get the water, the growers and Reno officials feel they may be deprived of theirs, and vice-versa. The whole episode appears to be a case history of how not to solve the West's water conflicts. It is quite possible that with some changes in water practices there will be water for all current users.

If the existing supplies, from the rivers and the aquifers, were used efficiently, without waste, there could well be enough water for all the present needs of the ranchers, the cities, the tribe and the lake. Conservation should be an integral part of any water plan for this or any basin in the West, but it seems to be the forgotten factor. There are no adequate conservation programs, and waste is endemic. In Reno, for example, residential water users are not metered; they pay a flat fee for all the water they can use. Fill the pools; flood the gutters; let the hose run all night and you pay no more.

In an arid region the colossal water waste that can result from such foolishness is indefensible. Rationally, all water use should be billed on a basic lifeline rate as gas and electricity are in many areas with steeply ascending rates thereafter. Users need a financial Incentive to conserve, recycle, economize. The greater part of the Truckee diversion goes to Newlands agriculture. There is an unmeasured potential for agricultural water saving through new, efficient irrigation techniques drip and sprinkler irrigation and LEPA flow energy precision application), which delivers water through drop tubes hanging from the sprinker arms instead of spraying it high in the air where much of it is lost to evaporation.

Also essential are the lining of all canals to cut seepage losses and methods of delivering the water so that it arrives at the precise time and in the precise amounts needed by the plants. In some places particularly Israel such methods have cut water use by half or more. How much could be saved in the Truckee watershed is unknown; the Environmental Defense Fund is studying the Truckee Pyramid basin to determine the conservation potential. In this region, as throughout the dryland West, water wars will continue at immense expenditure of time, money and energy until there is a drastic change in modes of thinking about water. Frontier thinking and frontier waste are no longer tolerable and should go the way of Tombstone and Hangtown.

'To the Paiutes," says LaNada James, "water and the lake are sacred. The tribal name is the cui-ui eaters. If the fish die, if the lake dies, the people die. Non-Indians find this hard to understand, but water is not just something you can measure in gallons or acre-feet. It's a spirit of life." If you stop to think about It, that statement makes more sense than all the reports from Washington and all the water agencies of the West The Paiutes and other tribes may be telling us something we need to hear for our own survival.

Listen to the drums and ponder. back to the nearest Mexican entry point and let go, are not the problem; the people who. escape capture are. But the apprehensions, as the Border calls them, provide the only direct clue to the total volume of illegal immigrant flow. To the distress of INS officials and many western politicians, these apprehensions are about to break all records.

In the fiscal year ending Sept 30, 1985, the INS totaled 1,183,455 apprehensions at the Mexican border, exceeding even the record year of 1954 when agents raided homes, factories, fields and bars throughout the Southwest in the shortlived "Operation Wetback." This fiscal year, apprehensions are running 43 percent ahead of last year's pace, according to figures provided by INS spokesman Richard Kenney. If the Mexican border were a laboratory, with all other factors kept constant while the apprehensions rose and fell, it might be possible to estimate how many more Mexicans are successfully entering the country. But the Border Patrol, desperate for resources to make some headway against the tide, has recently succeeded in adding 647 more officers to the force of 1982 who covered the Mexican border in fiscal 1985. Statisticians note that the 33 percent staff increase will spark a sharp rise in apprehensions even if the illegal border traffic remains steady. Everyone who has ever interviewed an apprehended Mexican also knows how much the INS figures are swollen by repeat business.

A single alien may be caught several times in a year, sometimes more than once on the same day, pushing the annual apprehension total up several notches. the funeral of a grandfather, then endured dozens of apprehensions before successfully returning across the border. Former Census Bureau expert Robert Warren, now INS statistical analysis branch chief, said he distrusts all recent estimates of illegal immigration. Only in hindsight, he said, can he be confident through a complex accounting of every Mexican alive in the world that there were no more than 2.5 million illegal immigrant Mexicans in the United States in 1980. Although still a large number, this is far below estimates of up to 12 million reported at the time.

Leo Chavez, research associate at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, called apprehension figures "terribly skewed data." Neither American nor Mexican authorities, he noted, try to count the thousands of illegal immigrants known to return to Mexico each year, making it even more difficult to estimate the net flow into the United States. Estimates of the net annual inflow today range widely. Chavez suggests 200,000 to 250,000. Patrick Burns, research director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, estimates 500,000 to 600,000. And INS officials usually refuse even to hazard a guess.

But critics of INS statistics are willing to concede that, at the very least, the inflow is increasing. "When you look at the Mexican economy," Drake said, "there is absolutely no question that the push pressures are a lot stronger. The free fall of the economy has pushed out not only the lower classes but the middle class. It is also clear that we have a lot of jobs to fill." BY JAY MATHEWS San Ysidro, San Diego County the infrared scopes that nightly scan the twisted terrain southeast of here, the men, women and children illegally crossing the Mexican border look like pale ghosts against the green-tinted screen. Often the observer has no patrol available to intercept them.

The phantoms pass off his screen, bound for jobs in East Los Angeles or Fresno, eluding the best efforts of Border Patrol statisticians, congressional staffers and university economists to even count them, much less catch them. The Immigration and Naturalization Service calls them illegal aliens. The immigration rights groups call them undocumented workers. The demographers call them "flow." All would like to know how many of them are successfully crossing the border each year, a crucial point of debate in the wide-ranging immigration legislation approved late last month by the House Judiciary Committee. But no one seems to know bow to find out.

For 60 years the Immigration and Naturalization Service has been recording the number of persons it catches on the 1933-mile border between the United States and Mexico. These Mexicans, usually bused right Jay Mathews wrote this article for the Washington Post..